Images, iconography, memories and performances of law in Indian High Courts

Abstract

ABSTRACT From the Colonial to the Contemporary inaugurates the study of legal architecture and judicial iconography in South Asia. Rahela Khorakiwala's pathbreaking book based in three High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras finds a distinct voice within court ethnographies that provide granulated accounts of the social life of law. This book instructs us on how images, architecture and iconography conserve memories of past injustice and impact questions of access to justice today. The book may be read as an exposition of how courts produce images of ‘justice as virtue' and ‘justice as struggle'. In identifying how the wounds of the past attach themselves to the rituals of courtrooms as sites of memorialization, Khorakiwala suggests that such regimes of images conserve different temporalities in the contemporary. For example, Indian courts are haunted by ghosts that rise from underground rooms to disused dockets today, as if waiting for their stories on death row to find acknowledgment even today. Laws' inheritance therefore is not of pride but also of suffering. For legal architecture produces overcrowding of prisoners and litigants by design. This engaging book makes a compelling case for studying how law’s power speaks through architecture, artifacts, paintings, statues, ceremonies, and rituals.